We are encouraged by the response to the introduction of Managed Disks. Since the announcement, we’ve seen many customers take advantage of this new way to manage persistent storage for their Virtual Machines.

We are excited to announce the capability of converting VMs with unmanaged Disks to Managed Disks in the Azure Portal! Now you can migrate to Managed Disks in single click without requiring PowerShell or CLI scripts.

Today, we are excited to announce the availability of the OS Disk Swap capability for VMs using Managed Disks. Until now, this capability was only available for Unmanaged Disks. With this capability, it becomes very easy to restore a previous backup of the OS Disk or swap out the OS Disk for VM troubleshooting without having to delete the VM.

Today, we are pleased to announce that customers using ExpressRoute can also migrate their Virtual Networks (including all the VMs in the VNET) to Azure Resource Manager without downtime. The instructions on how to do this can be found at Migrate ExpressRoute circuits and associated virtual networks from the classic to the Resource Manager deployment model.